Below, I wish to reproduce the epilogue to David Horowitz’s “Hating Whitey, and Other Progressive Causes.” Most of the chapters in this book appear in the magazine Salon. The epilogue to this book was written specifically for this selection, and I believe that it is the jewel in the crown. However, since the book has not sold well, and since it is very hard to secure a copy, I wish to reproduce the epilogue here in full. If this needs to be removed, please contact me and I will happily remove it. I am saddened that it is no longer accessible, especially how well it is written and how much wisdom is distilled in it.

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WHEN I WAS A LITERATURE STUDENT in college my Shakespeare professor drew our attention to the way the playwright turned to romance as he grew older, writing symbolic pastorals devoted to themes of redemption. According to my professor, this was a natural human progression, and he cited examples from other writers to prove his point. Youth is characterized by a hunger for information, he told us; age distills what it knows in parables, and returns to archetypal myths.

When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the most famous of his late romances and the very last of his plays, he was actually only forty-seven—more than a decade younger than I am now. Moreover, I have found my own experience to be exactly the opposite of what he predicted. Growing up in a progressive household in New York City (my parents were members of the Communist Party), I found myself enveloped in the vapors of a romantic myth not unlike that of Shakespeare’s pastorals or the fairy tales that had been read to me as a child. In the radical romance of our political lives, the world was said to have begun in innocence, but to have fallen afterwards under an evil spell, afflicting the lives of all with great suffering and injustice. According to our myth, a happy ending beckoned, however. Through the efforts of progressives like us, the spell would one day be lifted, and mankind would be freed from its trials. In this liberated future, “social justice” would be established, peace would reign, and harmony prevail. Men and women would be utterly transformed.

Being at the center of a heroic myth inspired passions that informed my youthful passage and guided me to the middle of my adult life. But then I was confronted by a reality so inescapable and harsh that it shattered the romance for good. A friend—the mother of three children—was brutally murdered by my political comrades, members of the very vanguard that had been appointed to redeem us all. Worse, since individuals may err, the deed was covered up by the vanguard itself who hoped, in so doing, to preserve the faith.

If this personal tragedy had remained isolated, perhaps the romance itself could have survived. But the murder of my friend was amplified and reflected in numerous others. Most notably, the slaughter of millions of poor peasants in Southeast Asia by the “liberation fronts” my comrades and I had aided and defended, who were supposed to be the angels of progress, too. When all was said and done, there was no happy ending. If anything, in the liberated nations the injustice was even greater than before. In retrospect it was apparent to me that most of the violence in my lifetime had been directed by Utopians like myself against those who would not go along with their impossible dreams. “Idealism kills,” Nietzsche had warned before all the bloodshed began. But nobody listened.

As a result of my experience, I developed, in age, an aversion to romantic myths. Instead I was seized with a hunger for information for the facts that would reveal to me the truth about the years I was a member of a heroic vanguard. The fall of the communist empire and the opening of its secrets have fed this passion. Preserved in the decoded communications between Soviet agents in America and their contacts in the Kremlin is the record of the truths we had denied, and whose denial made our romance possible. The truths revealed that we were just what our enemies had always said we were. There were spies among us, and cold-blooded agents for a tainted cause. And all of us, it could no longer be denied, had treason in our hearts in the name of a future that would never come.

In the battle of good and evil that formed the core of our romantic myth, we had enlisted—New Left and Old alike—on the wrong side of the historical conflict. We had set out as the proud harbingers of a progressive future. But what we had actually created were realities far worse than those we were seeking to escape. The enemies we scorned—patriots defending America—turned out to be the protectors of what was decent and pragmatically good, and had saved us from being consumed by our crimes.

It became clear to me that the world was not going to be changed into anything very different or better from what it had been. On this earth there would be no kingdom of freedom where lions would lie down with lambs. It should have been obvious when I began. Many things change, but people do not. Otherwise how could Shakespeare, or writers more ancient, capture in their creations a reality that we recognize and that still moves us today?

These revelations of experience had a humbling effect. They took my mind off the noble fantasies and forced me to focus on my ordinary existence. To see how common it was; how unheroic, ordinary, and unredeemed. The revelations that shattered my faith allowed me, for the first time, to look at my own mortality. I was not going to be born again in a New World; I was going to die like everyone else and be forgotten.

And that is when I realized what our romance was about. It was not about a future that was socially just, or about a world redeemed. It was about averting our eyes from this ordinary fact. Our romance was a shield protecting us from the terror of our common human fate. And that was why we clung to our dream so fiercely, despite all the evidence that it had failed. That was why we continued to believe, despite everything we knew. For who would ever want to confront such terror, unless forced to do so by circumstances beyond their control? Who would want to hear the voice of a future that was only calling them to their own oblivion?

And that is when I also realized that our progressive romance would go on. Some, like myself, might wake from its vapors under blows of great personal pain. But there would always be others, and in far greater number, who would not. A century of broken dreams and the slaughters they spawned would, in the end, teach nothing to those who had no reason to hear. Least of all would it cure them of their hunger for a romance that is really a desire not to know who and what we are.